


Summer Passing

by idyll



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Community: buffyverse1000, F/M, Ficlet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-08-02
Updated: 2004-08-02
Packaged: 2017-10-07 11:30:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/64738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idyll/pseuds/idyll
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Giles knows what it's like to be God-ridden.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Summer Passing

The summer is passing by like a wounded bird in the sky, plummeting down, closer and closer to the earth with every second, with every shift in the air.

The summer is passing like Tara, cripple-winged and falling, and there aren't words she can give Willow to make her understand what it feels like. What it means to be herself again. How it feels to miss the presence that used to be in her mind as much as she fears its return.

Giles has never asked what it felt like, how she's doing, what she dreams that causes her to wake up screaming. All he did was roll up his sleeve, show her a tattoo, tell her that he knows what it's like to be God-ridden, and offer her his company should she ever need it.

She takes him up on it two or three nights a week. Leaves Willow sleeping and finds Spike at the back porch, where he always is, listening for trouble that might endanger Dawn. Makes him walk her to Giles' and always promises that she won't leave until sunup.

The first three weeks, they just sat in the living room in the dark. Together in quiet solitude that moved in time with the old-fashioned ticking clock on Giles' desk. She's not sure, really, how it changed. She broke the silence the fourth week, whispered, "It was easy. I just had to sit back."

And Giles turned to her, face cast in steady shadows. Told her that was what made it an addiction to some. That was what made people dabble, made them offer themselves up to something they shouldn't, that they really didn't want. Said in a voice as steady as the shadows across his face that Glory would never return and she understood what he'd done.

He wasn't surprised when she wilted. She thinks, now, that was his plan all along. Take away Glory from her, insinuate himself.

She knocks lightly at his door, Spike walking off, her promise getting sucked into the black night. Giles opens the door, nods just once at her, and then walks to the sofa and sits down.

Tara takes her shoes off outside. Steps into the apartment and closes the door behind her before moving to him and sitting at his feet. He sets a hand in her hair.

"Did you do everything you were supposed to today?" he asks, voice sharp and distant but ringing soft and intimate in Tara's ears, because that's how it's meant.

"Yes, Giles," she whispers.

"Tell me."

So she tells him that she ate her breakfast, and smiled exactly twelve times, and that she took time to sit in the backyard in the sunlight with thoughts in her head that didn't include Glory.

"Good girl," he says, and she senses his nod. His fingers sift through her hair then caress her scalp "Did you select something of your own to do as well?"

"Yes, Giles."

"And what was it?"

"I took Dawn shopping at the mall. We bought her clothes for school and she convinced me to let her have one of those giant sticky buns from the food court."

He asks her how many times she thought of Glory in her head, how many of those times she wanted Glory back, and whether she remembered to think of him instead at those times. The thoughts came less frequently than last week, and she didn't forget even once to think "Giles" instead of "Glory" for the second week in a row.

He pulls her up onto her lap, rocks her slightly and she melts into the approval and the ease and the lack of anything she needs to be thinking or feeling or doing, and he gives her instructions for next week before he sets her on the floor again and reaches out to turn on a reading lamp.

He picks up a book, slides his glasses on his face, and Tara sits at his feet, her head against his knee, one arm wrapped around one of his calves, and the summer passes around her like a bird in steady flight, coasting along on the air.

.End


End file.
